


up and down the east coast

by skuls



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Post-Episode: s07e02 The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-23
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-10-15 02:10:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17520209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuls/pseuds/skuls
Summary: Bored from a lapse in cases due to Mulder's medical leave, Mulder convinces Scully to travel to New Hampshire in pursuit of Sasquatch sightings.(Dialogue prompts: “Pull over.  Let me drive for awhile.” & “You don’t have to say anything.”)





	up and down the east coast

He calls her on a Tuesday morning when he is supposed to be resting, only three weeks after his discharge from the hospital, with a proposal. He is supposed to be taking two months of medical leave, and she tells him “But this isn’t exactly work-related, Scully,” he teases. She can practically see his eyebrows waggling, as if he was standing right across from her.

She bites her lower lip, putting her feet up on the desk. “This had better not be another proposal to run off to Scotland and look for the Loch Ness Monster,” she tells him seriously, pretending she wouldn’t jump on that in a minute if it weren’t for his head injury. She’d do almost anything to feel normal again. She pretends that the sentence  _I have a proposal for you, Scully_ didn’t make her instantly, childishly think of marriage, of his voice over the phone in Maine. (Her cheeks are red with embarrassment.)

“No, not again,” he says coyly. “Well. Not exactly.”

“Mulder,” she says at length, knowingly.

“Scully,” he says, mimicking her, and she rolls her eyes gently. “I’ve been watching some sighting blogs lately, and I’ve noticed a pattern up in New Hampshire. Four sightings within the last two months.”

“Sightings of what?” she asks, suspicious.

“Sasquatch,” he clarifies. She bites her lip again, although she isn’t sure if it’s to stifle a grimace or a smile. She’s missed arguing with him. “It’s perfectly harmless, no danger or anything, and even you admitted that the Files are on a bit of a dry run right now. Which I’m guessing means you’re as bored as I am.” She can hear his grin over the phone. “C'mon, Scully,” he cajoles gently. “I’ll pay for gas. I won’t exert myself past what you say I should exert myself.”

“Mulder, three weeks ago, you were in the hospital because some madman did botched brain surgery on you. You shouldn’t be exerting yourself at all.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m inviting my doctor along.”

She can hear the tiniest pleading in his voice. She casts her eyes down on the paperwork covering her desk and swallows back a sigh. She  _has_  been bored. She’s stir-crazy. If Mulder hadn’t been calling her every single day, she probably would be making excuses to call him: just to check up, just to ask if he remembers this one detail for her report.  

As his doctor, she should be more sensible. But as his partner, she can’t help it. Sasquatch is a pitiful excuse for an X-File, but it is still an X-File.

“I’ll be there within an hour,” she says.

—

Mulder makes food for the road as if he were an elementary school mother. Sloppy sandwiches—peanut butter for him and turkey for her—stored in brown paper bags, carrot sticks, almonds, and three bags of sunflower seeds. Plus a couple packets of peanut M&Ms. His bandages came off a few days ago, and the line of stitches at his temple are just finished under the thatch of regrowing hair, the bill of his baseball cap from two weeks ago. “You look all ready for a field trip, Mulder,” she teases, raising her eyebrows at him. He shakes his head ruefully and plops his baseball cap down on her head as he climbs into the car. Hands her a packet of M&Ms and takes the lid off of her water bottle for her while she drives. They bicker over the radio all the way to Baltimore.

—

Near the Pennsylvania border, Mulder reads aloud to her from print-outs from his sighting blogs. He starts with the Sasquatch sightings, but he’s moved onto other cryptids and the like within a few minutes. “Hey, look, Scully, more Big Blue sightings,” he says, flapping a piece of paper in her face. A blurry picture is accompanied by equally blurry text, the ink smudged by the pads of Mulder’s fingers. “Want to go to Georgia next?”

She makes a face at the road. “Mulder, I thought we agreed that the deaths in Georgia—the deaths in Georgia that occurred  _almost four years ago_ —were due to the alligator.”

“But look at that picture, Scully!” He waves the print-out again. “Does that look like an alligator to you?”

She squints at the photo in brief increments before looking back to the road. “It looks vaguely like a tree branch.”

Feigning insult, he pouts. She reaches over and pats his knee, partially in reassurance and partially teasing. “We may be partners, Mulder,” she says gently, “but I am not galumphing up and down the East Coast all these next few weeks with your head energy. Especially not back to the place where my dog died. Let’s take it one sighting at a time, okay?”

There’s a sudden, straggling silence following that, and she suddenly worries that she’s hurt his feelings. (She doesn’t blame him for Queequeg’s death. She doesn’t; and it was a long time ago, anyways.) She looks over at him, and her stomach twists at the guilt on his face. She’s ready to apologize when he speaks, and his voice is even and steady. Not the self-loathing reaction she expected; a little guilty, but only a little. “I’ll buy you a new dog, Scully,” he says. “Or a cat. Or some fish, even. Fish are amazing, Scully, I speak from experience.”

Something like fear curdles in her gut, something like a smile tugs at the corners of her mouth. Discussions like this is the type of thing she desperately wants, but is too afraid to ask for. She remembers her lips on his forehead, his soft, slurred voice in the hospital as he described his brain surgery-induced dreams of a suburban life with Diana, the guilty lurch when he whispered,  _But I don’t want that with her._ The unsaid implications there. She grips the wheel hard. “We’ll see, Mulder,” she says, trying to sound amused, but her voice trembles. “We’ll see.”

—

They stop for dinner somewhere in New York. She checks his condition, leaning over the table and the basket of chips he talked her into ordering to check his pupils. She brushes hair away from his eyes and he looks up at her almost shyly. She sits back in her seat too hard.

Halfway through dinner, Mulder reveals a folded up map from the car and traces their route with his ink-smudged finger. He’s marked the specific spots where there’s been sightings, boxed them off, and she moves to his booth to look, unintentionally pressing their arms together. She’s missed this. She’s missed him at the office, she thinks, and is saying it nearly before she realizes it—”I’ve missed you in the office.”

He looks at her in surprise, blinking with huge eyes. She leans closer to look at the map, and her hair brushes across his jaw; she can feel his eyes on her, astonished and affectionate.

—

She starts yawning somewhere in Connecticut. She’s not too tired yet—she wants to get as far as they can tonight—so she keeps going. But she keeps yawning, her mouth gaping wider and wider, until she feels Mulder’s hand brushing over her cheek. “Pull over,” he says in a soft, gentle voice. “Let me drive for awhile.”

She blinks at the road, the blur of headlights stubbornly. She’d thought he was asleep. “Oh, Mulder, I’m fine,” she says. “And besides that, you shouldn’t be driving.”

“You’re tired,” he says matter-of-factly. “You’ve been yawning for forty-five minutes now.”

“I thought you were asleep, Mulder,” she murmurs. Her chest is warm, swelling with affection; she feels foolish and tired and strangely, deliriously happy.

“I was. Your yawn is pretty loud.” She shoots him a look, eyebrow cocked, and he grins goofily. “ _Endearingly_  loud. Endearingly.”

“Uh-huh.” She stifles another yawn with her fist, shaking her head.

“C'mon, Scully.” His voice is low and warm. “C'mon. Pull over and let me drive to a  _hotel_ , at least.” He taps her kneecap with one finger. “We don’t have to get there tonight.”

She links thumbs with him on an impulse before he moves his hand away, wraps her fingers around his. “You’re not driving,” she says sternly. “Not with your injury. Doctor’s orders. You should get some sleep.”

He rubs a slow circle on her palm with his thumb. “ _You_  should get some sleep.”

They both should get some sleep. Scully nods, her jaw clenched. They pass an exit sign with a singular hotel listed. She flips her blinker on.

—

There is only one room available, she tells him at the car. He throws her a wry smile. “Of course there is.” (They’ve dealt with their share of the only-one-room-left in their time.)

“I went ahead and took it,” she says, shifting from foot to foot. “So we can get some sleep.”

He nods, a whisper of a grin on his face. “Good call,” he says. “We can head up to New Hampshire in the morning.”

The room is fairly nice, considering their standard accommodations. Queen-sized bed, mutely patterned comforter, striped wallpaper. Scully checks Mulder out again, examining his stitches on the edge of the bed. He’s as tired as she is, his eyelids lolling. She sifts her fingers softly through his hair and he turns his head towards her touch, their foreheads nearly bumping. He swallows, his  eyes dark, fathomless. “What’s the prognosis, doc?”

“You’re fine.” Her hand drops from his hair, brushing down his stubbly cheek. “But you need to sleep on the bed, okay?  _Not_  the floor. Absolutely not,” she tells him sternly. “Okay?”

He swallows. She can see his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Only if you do the same.”

She nods. She looks away, down at the carpet under their feet, clustered together at the edge of the bed. She can feel his warmth against her side, resists the urge to lean into it. She starts to stand, their knees bumping together, and his hand curls around hers. “Scully, I, uh…” he begins, his voice warm with sincerely. “I have some things I wanted to—” He breaks off in the middle with an enormous yawn that  _surely_ rivals her own yawning, and she smiles. She cannot help it. That warm feeling, that anticipation is back, and there is no fear accompanying it. “… to, uh, to say to you,” he finishes, blinking rapidly as if to try to stay awake. He squeezes her hand.

She’s still smiling as she shakes her head, still biting back her own yawns. “That’s very sweet, Mulder,” she says quietly, “but I think it can wait until the morning.”

He shakes his head, nearly pouting, stubborn as always. “I don’t want to wait,” he says, and he sounds half-drunk on fatigue, but somehow, it’s one of the most serious moments she’s seen from him. He lifts his free hand to thumb her cheek, the hair slipped out from behind her ear. “I… I-I’ve wanted to say these things to you for a long time, and I've… I’ve waited too long to say them. I need to say them now.”

Overwhelmed tears well up in Scully’s eyes. In the past, over the course of their partnership, she’s been so unsure—never knowing how to interpret the little things, never being confident in what an interaction means, in how much Mulder cares for her or in the manner in which she cares for him. But now she  _knows_. She just knows; it feels like everything has snapped into place. They’re exhausted and half-asleep in a hotel room in Connecticut, and he’s trying to say something to her that she desperately wants to hear, but he doesn’t even have to say it. They don’t need it.

She wipes her eye with one hand, whispers, “Oh, Mulder.” He’s shooting her a concerned look; she leans up to press a sleepy kiss to his forehead. “It’s okay,” she says, and leans bonelessly into his shoulder. “It’s okay. You don’t have to say anything.”  _I know,_  she thinks, the words on her lips.  _I know._

She worries, briefly, that he won’t understand, that he’ll be hurt or think her dismissive.

But he doesn’t say a word. He winds an arm around her back and pulls her close. He puts his lips to her hair and doesn’t say anything, and she thinks,  _Oh._  He knows, too.

They sit there together, unmoving, her face hidden against his shirt and their fingers tangled together, some silent understanding between them: This is enough. It’s everything.


End file.
